I run the flood warning system for a local flood commission, and as such we have weather monitoring sites and radio repeaters all over the county. We’re one of those Western counties that is bigger than a couple of states combined back East, and today I got reminded of that by virtue of visiting seven sites scattered around the extremes of the county on each side all in one day.

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This was all necessitated by Covid-19 and a grant administrator requiring us to provide the documentation for grant verification instead of going out and doing it themselves since they’re working from home. This was fine, except they didn’t tell us until after the fact that federal regulation whatever requires 4 photos of each site from each direction, which meant my today was Tour de (large county) to capture the images since we only took one or two pictures at installation... Some of these sites are over an hour from the nearest paved road.

I did the day in a generally circular route, covering 233 miles in six hours and ten minutes of drive time visiting close to the county limits in each cardinal direction. It was a good day, as more than half the distance was on dirt. Only a few spots of 4wd low were required in some sandy spots.

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It actually wasn’t a total loss, as I needed to go back out to two of the seven sites anyway. One needed a bullet hole patched, and another need some programming fixes on the datalogger.

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Things were seen:

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Some better-than-average graffiti on an interstate underpass.

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Yellow Poppies. In a normal spring, a few are seen here and there. Having had an extraordinarily wet and cool winter/early spring, many places of the desert floor look like this. It is uncanny, and I’ve never seen a bloom like it in a decade living down here.

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There weren’t any yellow poppies blooming in the Southwestern part of the county not too far from the US/Mexico border, but the Wild Rhubarb was.

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As one who sometimes stacks things, I deeply appreciate whoever stacked these remnants of old railroad ties out in the middle of nowhere.

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One of these sites is at a county fire station, where they have some interesting stuff out back.

Count the six hours of drive time, taking pictures at a site, reprogramming a datalogger and patching one bullet hole in a standpipe, and it made for a great, but long, day. It sure beat sitting in my office, which I make a point of doing less than 50% of my working time.

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I’m still working as one deemed “essential.” We’ve got some high-risk folks on administrative leave, and some folks working from home. I’m fine coming into work, as I literally have a building to myself and a work truck that no one else drives. I have to intentionally go out of my way to physically interact with another person right now at work.

If it came down to it, I could “work from home” some in the sense that I can run the software side of the system from anywhere with an internet connection. My doggos would like that, but I’m fine continuing to go out and play in the dirt.